Published: January 24, 2012

WASHINGTON — In March 2002, John Kiriakou coordinated a team of fellow Central Intelligence Agency officers and Pakistani agents that descended upon a house in Pakistan where they believed they might find Abu Zubaydah, a high-level figure in Al Qaeda.

The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation.

Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full.

That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell.

“The CIA informed the Committee that due to CIA record retention policies, the CIA could not produce all CIA email communications requested by the Committee,” the report noted, explaining that the desired information was sometimes recovered from a reply message when the original email was missing.

Agency emails turned out to be a critical source of information, a fact that illuminates the Committee’s sharpresponse recently to the (now suspended) CIA proposal to the National Archives (NARA) to destroy most Agency emails of non-senior officials.

Thus, the gruesome record of the waterboarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah “was referenced in emails, but was not documented or otherwise noted in CIA cables.” (This is at odds with NARA’s initial view that “It is unlikely that permanent records will be found in these email accounts that is not filed in other appropriate files.”)

The Committee report is also a remarkable demonstration of the congressional oversight function that is all the more impressive because it was performed in adverse, unfavorable conditions.

It is striking to see how the CIA sometimes treated the Senate Intelligence Committee, its leadership and its staff with the same disdain and evasiveness that is often perceived by FOIA requesters and other members of the public.

Committee questions were ignored, inaccurate information was provided, and the oversight process was gamed.

“Internal CIA emails include discussion of how the CIA could ‘get… off the hook on the cheap’ regarding [then-Committee] Chairman [Bob] Graham’s requests for additional information…. In the end, CIA officials simply did not respond to Graham’s requests prior to his departure from the Committee in January 2003,” the report said.

“I am deeply disturbed by the implications of the study for the committee’s ability to discharge its oversight responsibility,” wrote Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in his additional remarks. “Because it appears from the study that the committee was continuously misled as to virtually all aspects of this program, it naturally raises the extremely troubling question as to whether we can trust the representations of the agency in connection with difficult or sensitive issues in the future.”

But minority members of the Committee disputed this characterization: “In reality, the overall pattern of engagement with the Congress shows that the CIA attempted to keep the Congress informed of its activities,” they wrote in their extensive dissenting views.

Perhaps the most important achievement of the Committee report was to document and memorialize the fact that agents of the US Government practiced torture. Not “harsh measures” or “enhanced techniques,” but torture.

Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), who criticized what she said were methodological flaws in the Committee report, said in her additional views that “Despite these significant flaws, the report’s findings lead me to conclude that some detainees were subject to techniques that constituted torture. This inhumane and brutal treatment never should have occurred.”

By the same token, the most important omission from the report is the absence of any discussion of remedies.

Now that it is firmly established that “we tortured some folks,” as President Obama awkwardly put it, the question is what to do about it. Confession without atonement is incomplete.

Prosecution seems problematic for a number of reasons, including the difficulty of localizing responsibility, when it is entire institutions and not just particular officials that failed.

A different approach to the problem would start by considering the individuals who suffered abuse at the hands of the U.S. government, including a number of persons who were detained in error. Congress could now ask how some of them (i.e. those who are still alive) could be compensated in some measure for what was wrongly done to them.

Several previousefforts to seek remedies for torture were deflected by use of the state secrets privilege. In light of the detailed findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, that sort of evasion should be harder to sustain. Congress could accelerate a resolution of the problem with a focused investigation of what potential remedies are now feasible and appropriate.

Kiev. As cited by Itar Tass, Ukraine’s new Minister of Economic Development and Trade Aivaras Abromavicius said on Wednesday the country was in fact a bankrupt. “The state, as a matter of fact, is a bankrupt, so, it is simply unrealistic to expect us to offer real, but not declarative, programmes of motivation,” he said at a session of the Verkhovna Rada /parliament/ committee for economic policy. “Hence, the main thing now is not to impede businesses, and business will put things at rights.” He promised that it would take about two years for Ukraine to be ranked among top..

December 23, 2014

When created in 1947, the CIA was meant to coordinate objective intelligence and thus avert some future Pearl Harbor attack, but its secondary role – engaging in covert operations – came to corrupt its independence, a problem that must now be addressed, says ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.

Update: The „Associates“ of „Company Y“ are now known, as is „CIA officer 2.“ Additional people and details have become known.

The press has been hard at work uncovering the pseudonyms used and nailing down the true identities of the site. I compile them here.

The most important outstanding questions: who are Detainees „R“ & „S,“ and where is detention site „red?“ While I feel pretty strongly about redacting the names of low-level personnel from the NSA slides, which are technical in nature, I have zero interest in protecting torturers. The public has a right to know where these black sites were, and the detainees deserve a name and a fair trial.

Detention sites:

BLACK – Romania

BLUE – „Quartz“ – Stare Kiejkuty, Poland

BROWN – Afghanistan

COBALT – „Salt Pit“ – Afghanistan

GRAY – Afghanistan

GREEN – Thailand

INDIGO – Guantanamo

MAROON – Guantanamo

ORANGE – Afghanistan

VIOLET – Lithuania

RED – This could be an additional site in one of the above countries, or someplace entirely different. It is mentioned only once in the report, on page 140 of 499, and the entry is almost entirely redacted.

The „Associates“ are David Ayers, Randall Spivey, James Sporleder, Joseph Matarazzo, and Roger Aldrich.

It should be noted that there is no „Company X“ in this report, I found this peculiar. It seems that there should be one, and as it happens there are several shady „Companies‘ known: „Premier Executive Transport Services“ Incorporated in Dedham Massachusetts, is known to have been part of the CIA rendition program. The names of its officers include „Coleen Bornt,“ „Brian Dice“ and „Tyler Edward Tate.“ These are fictitious people.

[Redacted] – Ron Czarnetsky, CIA Chief of Station on Warsaw, Poland from 2002 to 2005. This would make him responsible for site BLUE.

[no mention] Alfreda Frances Bikowsky – Made herself involved in Waterboarding in Poland (BLUE) in March of 2003. Took trip unassigned and on own dime. Was „scolded“ and told it „wasn’t supposed to be entertainment.“ Would have been there at the same time as Mitchell and Jessen. ….

By Norman Solomon
January 15, 2015
This week, in a federal courtroom, I’ve heard a series of government witnesses testify behind a screen while expounding on a central precept of the national security state: The CIA can do no wrong.

Those CIA employees and consultants are more than mere loyalists for an agency that soaks up $15 billion a year and continues to loosen the bonds of accountability. The docket says “United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling,” but a more discerning title would be “National Security State v. The Public’s Right to Know.”

For the first time in 30 years, a case has gone to trial in a civilian court under the Espionage Act with charges that the defendant gave classified information to news media. Not far from the CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia, legal jargon is flying around the courtroom, but the law has very little to do with this case.

Top officials in the U.S. government leak classified information all the time, without punishment. But Jeffrey Sterling was not a top official. He’s a former CIA officer, charged with giving classified information to journalist James Risen about a CIA operation that provided Iran with flawed nuclear weapon blueprints — information that appeared in Risen’s 2006 book State of War.